Cleaner seas is goal of Volvo Ocean Race | VIDEO

By Rachael Thatcher Staff writer

Thursday

May 17, 2018 at 7:37 PMMay 17, 2018 at 11:35 PM

NEWPORT — A group of environmentalists from around the world gazes over the Fort Adams State Park dock, peering into the trash skimmer at the Volvo Ocean Race Village. A cigarette slowly floats into the device and the small crowd cheers. The seemingly small victory is a display of progress toward the overarching goal of saving our oceans.

The Volvo Ocean Race reinforces its sustainability mission by educating visitors at each port, conducting research and providing two Seabins. These Seabins are motor-powered, debris-collecting mechanisms that suck in water and capture trash and other potentially harmful materials.

“In Newport we typically empty them once a day, but it depends on the port,” said Lucy Hunt, the sustainability education manager for the Volvo Ocean Race. There was a need for far more frequent emptying cycles in Itajai, Brazil, Hunt explained.

This might be because Newport is no stranger to the debris-collection process. In fact, Aquidneck Island is home to four of its own trash skimmers. Much larger than the Seabins, two of these box-like floating structures are housed at Perrotti Park, one is at New England Boatworks in Portsmouth, and there’s one attached to the main dock at Fort Adams.

“We got a grant from 11th Hour Racing to install the skimmers, Sail Newport is a partner and operates the unit, and we look to secure funding to continue education and the outreach,” said Dave McLaughlin, executive director of Clean Ocean Access, a local environmental organization.

The trash skimmer operates similarly to the Volvo’s Seabin. It has a pump that extracts the water from the unit, allowing more water to come in the side doors in order to capture the solids. The operator from either Sail Newport or the city of Newport empties the material on a regular basis, typically twice a day, using a skimming net.

Over the past two years, the four skimmers collectively have removed about 14,000 pounds of debris from the ocean. On average, each one removes 25-50 pounds of debris per cycle, although there have been instances at Perrotti Park where they’ve removed more than 200 pounds in just one day.

“They’re highly effective. We see them as a great educational opportunity," McLaughlin said. "It makes you think, 'What can I do?' You feel compelled when you see the material in them. If you see the foam cup or nip bottle, you say 'I need to give that up.'

“Seven billion people know about the problem of plastic, but nobody knows what to do. The Volvo Ocean Race is bringing attention and awareness of solutions,” he said.

It’s also bringing a variety of nonprofits and environmentally driven businesses together. Jackie Nunez, founder and program manager of The Last Plastic Straw, weighed in before providing those around her with metal, reusable straws.

“It’s like an oil spill. Think about it: We’re in a time where we’re fighting against oil spills, but we’re participating in a form of an oil spill ourselves from the land, through plastic. There’s ways we can curtail that ourselves,” Nunez said.

After emptying the devices and transporting the material to the One Ocean Exploration Zone in the Race Village, the crew members spread it out onto a table. Using gloves to dig through the debris, they uncovered pen caps, a T-shirt, plastic bags, cigarette butts and, of course, plenty of fishing wire and microplastic.

The most common offender? “The cigarette butt, but it depends where we are,” Hunt said. She then displayed small, bead-like pieces, or nurdils, which is plastic in its initial form before it’s melted down to create something. “This should be in a factory somewhere, nowhere near the ocean,” Hunt explained. Clinging to pieces of seaweed, the nurdils can appear to be fish eggs, making them a dangerous meal to creatures in the sea.

Tiny pieces of plastic might seem somewhat harmless; however, there’s a larger issue at hand. McLaughlin compares the ocean to our own bodies.

“Imagine eating one of these little pieces every day,” he said while displaying a small particle of plastic. “You might not even notice a piece of this in your salad, but over time it will affect you.” These small pieces are ingested by fish, which means they ultimately could end up in human bodies, too.

Sören Gutekunst, a scientist for the Volvo Ocean Race’s education program, travels to each port, collecting samples and information from the Turn the Tide on Plastic team boat. He takes the tracking device from onboard and identifies and calculates a multitude of elements such as sea surface temperature, sea surface salinity and the presence of microplastics, providing data for his potentially groundbreaking research.

“There’s not many opportunities to gather so much data, over such a large distance, in such a short period of time,” Gutekunst said. Because of the Volvo Ocean Race, he is able to conduct this large-scale research and identify the effects of microplastic on a greater scale.

The results of Gutekunst's research, along with the findings from the Seabins, will provide data for sustainability education and environmental programs worldwide. In the meantime, Clean Ocean Access is brainstorming ideas on how to repurpose the materials captured by the trash skimmers in Newport.

“We’re going to try to put together a challenger program to see what kind of innovative ways people can come up with to do something with the co-mingled material," McLaughlin said